At the airport, the staff now offers comfort dogs, gorgeous Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds available for petting and holding. The idea is to comfort scared kids, delight passersby, and generally lift up the space. Yes, that’s exactly what dogs do.
What a wonderful idea. However, not everyone is happy about our love of dogs.
We’ve all become sensitive about threats on the horizon, small hints in science journals or from establishment media that target what we love. There was a time when we could treat these as an opportunity for debate and discussion. Events of the last five years suggest that parlor games are over. With so much trust lost, we are newly aware that these threats can turn out to be real and thus merit more attention.
The issue now concerns pets and dogs in particular. Are they coming for them?
I wondered about that line at the time. The whole theory of the article is that humans are everywhere surrounded by icky things that can infect us. We’ve neglected these threats for many thousands of years by traveling around, moving here and there, domesticating animals, and living too closely together. This must change, they opine, because bad pathogens are ever more leaping from the outside world into humans.
The empirics of the cause bear discussion. There really is no evidence that humans are uniquely in danger in our times as versus from the beginning of time. But the desire on the part of the intellectual elite to immanentize the eschaton never entirely disappears. That’s why there is a legitimate worry that they are coming for our pets.
To quote from the breathless article: Dogs “are implicated in direct killing and disturbance of multiple species, particularly shore birds, but also their mere presence, even when leashed, can disturb birds and mammals, causing them to leave areas where dogs are exercised. Furthermore, scent traces and urine and faeces left by dogs can continue to have this effect even when dogs are not present. Faeces and urine can transfer zoonoses to wildlife and, when accumulated, can pollute waterways and impact plant growth. Owned dogs that enter waterways contribute to toxic pollution through wash-off of chemical ectoparasite treatment applications. Finally, the sheer number of dogs contributes to global carbon emissions and land and fresh water use via the pet food industry. We argue that the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised.”
The solution seems obvious: get rid of them!
You can see what is happening here. Some among the scientific elite have picked up on Fauci’s call and added new research to back a growing attack on dogs and probably every other pet, too. It’s really an extension of the germophobia that spread lockdown ideology, and the conviction that the fix for all that ails us is to live in constant fear and isolation from all other living things.
No, the threat of dog confiscation is not around the corner. But what these sorts of campaigns can do is feed regulatory restrictions. More registrations, more shots, more tracking, more chips under the skin, more fines, more rules, and so on. In the industrialized West, we already face tremendous restrictions on breeding, raising, and selling pets.
It’s doubtful that anyone is going to take your pet. The way this works is to make it more difficult for the next generation to come along. They put the squeeze on, introducing ever more controls and mandates, fines and fees, monitoring and investigations, until it is just not worth it anymore. The costs outweigh the benefits. That’s how the anti-pet forces play the long game.
When I was a kid, you could go into any pet store and see the puppies all begging for owners. It was like going to the zoo, and it was wonderful. This has entirely disappeared, based on a very effective but ultimately ridiculous panic about “puppy mills,” thus forcing would-be pet owners to adopt or pay exorbitant prices from privileged breeders, which can require traveling across the country to get your favorite pet. It is very likely that you have to pay the town for the privilege, and that your pet has a required vaccination schedule that is tracked and enforced by private groomers and public authorities.
Thus is there already evidence of certain freak-out in the public over pets in general. I can easily imagine conditions under which this would be intensified by a public campaign. All it takes is one rabies bite or more crossover infections of some newly named pathogen. The panic against animals, and domesticated animals in particular, is just waiting to be fired up under the right conditions.
The global amplification of what would otherwise be an obscure journal article in Australia illustrates the point. The campaign is already underway and not going away anytime soon.
Americans will not easily acquiesce to having their pets taken away, but we’ve already given in to government control of pets in ways that other countries would find intolerable. I like to spend time in Mexico City, which has only the loosest possible enforcement of any pet rules.
It’s not uncommon to be in a church and see a dog walk by. You ask around, and people say that this dog generally just hangs around the neighborhood. It’s the same in restaurants and parks. Nice, sweet, happy animals roam freely and no one particularly cares. In the United States such a dog would be rounded up and slaughtered in minutes!
There are also no restrictions on breeding and selling pets. Nor should there be. This is a wonderful way for people to make money, allowing their own animals to do what comes naturally. To stop this practice is extremely cruel and damaging to many rural people who supplement their income producing valuable pet friends for others. The crackdown on this practice in the United States was entirely a class-based imposition of something that is wholly fine and traditional.
Today, there are many in the Amish and Mennonite communities who breed wonderful dogs and sell them online. You have to pick them up in person and mostly pay cash, but at least it is permitted. But even they report nonstop harassment from health authorities who would prefer they stop this practice entirely, thus denying alternative communities another income stream that makes their lives possible.
In other words, the attack on dogs is not new at all but actually dates back many decades. This is how control over our lives works these days: it creeps in gradually over time, and we hardly notice it until it is too late. It is the proverbial frog in water that is never so alarmed at the heating water to inspire a leap out.
I hardly need to make the case for pet ownership. They bring delight to lives. As for disease and so on, exposure to pathogens is how the immune system improves. On this score, Fauci and the other Covidians had it entirely wrong. The path to health is not extreme isolation but exposure and normal human interactions. It’s the same with pets. They are not to be feared but loved and treasured.
The airport people have it right: dogs love people and people love dogs, almost like we are meant to be together.
